60 days till midnight...

Swine flu is the Y2K of our time, the beast that roared but never bit, the River Phoenix of the disease-disaster constellation....right? Wrong...

The first few days of swine flu seemed like the aporkalypse. 1800-odd cases, 80 deaths and plane-loads of coughers and sneezers on their way to threaten our 'border security'. Antivirals were in short supply, pork was suspicious (if not unsafe) and we needed to close the airports and stick thermometers in tourists in order to keep ourselves safe. The ABC was doing its bit for the nation with some hard hitting reportage on scurrillously unhindered passengers at Sydney Airport. The end was nigh...

But then it wasn't.... no one that mattered was getting sick, there wasn't any Australian cases and masks were not the newest fashion accessory in Mosman. Besides; Madonna was getting remarried, the government was inventing words and abusing idiom (see "nation-building", "forged in the fire") and NRL players were objectifying women again. All was right with the world, the danger had passed.

At this point, most right-thinking media consumers probably saw a furphy...the eggheads and politicans had sold us a pup!! The cynical saw an availability heuristic in action; "suspicious thinkers" saw a consipracy at every-turn. Pockets had been lined, Roche had sold a bucket-load of Tamiflu and curious troop movements were seen in the Arctic...we'd been hoodwinked and there was actually nothing to fear. Just another beat-up by rent-seekers and panic-button pushers.

The problem with this perfectly reasonable view is its distance from pesky reality. The latest scientific information, based upon initial case and fatality data from Mexico, turns up some interesting information. Firstly, the speed with which the virus spreads seems to be relatively slow...for a pandemic (in germ geek-speak; R0=1.6). The number of people who will likely die once they have been infected also seems to be quite low (CFR <0.6%). style="font-weight: bold;">is a potential Lilliputian.

Of course, that doesn't mean it's not going to affect you, just that it might take some time before it does. The impression that the H1N1 flu was a fizzer is tempting, but misleading; especially when the models of how disease spreads through a population seem to tell us that pandemics can have relatively long periods of stasis before reaching a tipping point beyond which the disease spreads rapidly and effectively.

Therefore, to put the provisional R0 of 1.4-1.6 in context, we need to go down in the weeds a little bit. For those of you allergic to graphs...shield your eyes now.

• from Caley, Becker, Philp. (2007). ‘The Waiting Time for Inter-Country Spread of Pandemic Influenza’ http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000143#s3

(A) Given our value for R from the Science paper. The delay before an epidemic-inducing 20 concurrent infectious cases in Australia (or any country outside of North Am) has a 95% probability of being between 40 and 70 days from initiation of the epidemic in the source region.
(B) Number of travellers leaving source region and arriving in at-risk country per day has a negligible effect on the median delay once number of travellers >100 (i.e. remains at ~60 days for R₀ of 1.5)
(C) Screening incoming travellers for symptoms has a negligible effect on delay
(D) “In general, the additional delay achieved by introducing non-pharmaceutical border control measures is generally small in comparison with the natural delay”

The (highly) general conclusion from this is that we may have to wait up to two months for the natural introduction of the pandemic into Australia....and that border screening will do very, very little to alter this. Sixty days is a long time for the media-land goldfish (and its ADHD brother, the blogosphere), and hence the tendency is towards swiftly shifting attentions and the phenomenon of rapidly appearing and dissappearing threats.

The idea that disease could take a long time to get to Australia also works counter-intuitively in a world were the bananas on your kitchen table were in the Phillipines two days ago. But the confusion is lessened when you realise that the probabilities of any one passenger on a flight to Australia being infectious with a disease that has only infected a few thousand people in a country of 100 million, while rising towards 1, are relatively small in the initial stages of an epidemic.

Hence the idea that we are 60 days from midnight...or atleast 60 days from when I'll be proven wrong...

Hello Pot, This Is Kettle.

Today Tony Abbott joined with Mr Sincerity Malcolm Turnbull in criticising Kevin Rudd's people skills.

This from Abott, Howard's gaffe-man of the 2007 election. Remember his attack of asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton, just days before Bernie died? And then there was his lovely handling of his late arrival to the health debate later that day.

Yes. Tony Abbott is a man whose people skills are second to none.

(Which isn't to say that Kevin 'working families' Rudd is not an automaton. I just don't really dig Abbott or Turnbull having a go at people for their personalities, or lack there-of.)

Best Book Review Ever

I've always admired AC Grayling, but this book review of his takes the cake.

Some choice excerpts:

It is sometimes hard to know whether books that strike one as silly and irresponsible, like Dissent over Descent, the latest book from Steve Fuller, are the product of a desire to strike a pose and appear outrageous (the John Gray syndrome), or really do represent that cancer of the contemporary intellect, post-modernism.

And in the next paragraph:

[...] at the end of these nearly 300 pages of wasted forest he tells us what science needs in order to justify its continuation (oh dear, poor science, eh?) and what Intelligent Design, a theory he defended before a US Federal Court in the 2005 Dover Trial, needs to “realise its full potential in the public debate” – that is: how a theory trying to bend the facts to prove its antecedent conviction that Fred (or any arbitrary and itself unexplained conscious agency) designed and created the world and all in it, can attain its full potential in the public debate. This, note, from a professor at a proper British university. Well: if this is not proof of the efficacy of Jesuit educational methods, nothing is.

It just gets better from there.

Of course, it gets particularly interesting when Steve Fuller responds.

I wish I could repay AC Grayling’s compliment by naming an exotic mental pathology after him, but regrettably his review of Dissent over Descent displays disorders of a much more mundane kind: he has merely failed to read the book properly and does not know what he is talking about.

And then Grayling has the last word:

Steve Fuller complains, as do all authors whose books are panned, that I did not read his book properly (or at all). Alas, I did.

...OR IS IT?






(Thanks to OTF Wank for drawing my attention to this.)

You learn something new every day.

Apparently dinosaurs helped to build the pyramids!

More stupid:

“When man landed on the moon (in 1969), they expected the landing module to sink in a deep layer of dust. But the layer was only a few inches deep. This proves that the universe is still young!”

Actually the best bit is that the Maltese education director is named "Dr. Borg".

Why we (or I) fight.

So I've been reading a bit lately on the imminent launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the latest and certainly most ambitious project by CERN, at the French-Swiss border. It reminds me of why I do what I do (or at least how I can justify why I do what I do, which may be as good as I can get). Now, one question is "but Nick, you work in Ethics. How does a big-ass atom smasher give you pause about why you do what you do?"

Well, it is partly because of my science background, but also at the sheer scale of this project that CERN is attempting. I mean, in my romantic vision of the function of the philosopher, it is the uncovering of some deeper truths in our world that enlighten the philosopher, the colleagues they work with, and (at least I sincerely hope and my be deluded as a result of this belief) the world at large. Yes, continentals, I hear you sneering and muttering dark saying about the crimes of Descartes. But I sincerely believe that you also have made a very positive contribution to my life, even if only because I spend so much time scratching my head about things you've said.

But, as usual, I digress. While I'm doing so, take a look at some funkay pictures

If philosophy is the seeking out of truths for the noble purpose of raising humanity up, and not merely the sitting about ranting about minor problems with semantic content in papers written by those long dead (although that is also, in some respects, important in its own way), then the women and men who have worked on the LHC are philosophers without compare. Far be it to merely talk about what the deeper structure of the universe might be like, they have instead decided that they'll try and actually find out, by smashing together a set of particles together at such a speed that space and time itself are sundered, and hopefully a bunch of particles will be seen that every individual in the world who has studied particle physics up to (and of course beyond) a postgrad level is hoping exists. And if they don't, so much is the better because unlike (it seems) many aspects of philosophy, physics can be concisely disproved, torn asunder, and left to die. And physicists in general seem to be pretty okay with this. Don't mistake me: they aren't all, and nor is this typical of most sciences. Physics, in many ways, has it easy.

And no, this isn't going to solve world hunger, the energy crisis, global warming, extreme antibiotic resistant tuberculosis, corporate paedophilia, the rampant injustices of the free-market economic rationalist state, vertical power structures, retributive justice and all its worries (good luck to Chuck on his impending thesis submission!), or any of the plethora of terrible problems that plague our world.

But it is, in its own way, very beautiful, and enthralling to those who have seen what has been written on it. And why else is the world worth being in to the point that there are a growing number of philosophers trying to get out of the ivory tower, hit the streets and get some change happening? not that we are doing so very fast, but this is a growth period for the movement, I feel. Still, Clive does it well.

More than people might think, the LHC is the magnum opus of much of current science. It is one of the projects that those who practice, study, or merely dabble in the hard sciences are so keen to see happen. And I think a world where there is less of the above problems, less affluenza, and more experiments that might not even occur because the experiment itself will go back in time to stop itself happening. This thing pushes the edges of human understanding about the limits of our collective power over the universe, the strangeness of the world we live in, and (to this writer), gives me more faith in the wondrous aspects of science enriching our lives than anything Richard Dawkins had to say on the subject. It is my hope that the more of my world will be able to see and appreciate these wonders, and not just the rich white folk like myself (ha, I called myself rich). And that, at least, is one of the many reasons why I do what I do.

Bad Science for the masses

So the SMH, in all its scientific integrity, reported on pot smokers being not so mellow. The venerable Kate Benson, medical reporter, writes:

More than a third of people who present at Sydney emergency departments after smoking cannabis are violent and half have mental health problems such as severe anxiety and suicidal thoughts, shattering the image that dope smokers are relaxed and sleepy, researchers have found.

Wow, my impressions are certainly shattered. Who would have thought that out of the (no doubt) hundreds of thousands of pot smokers in my country alone, that the ones who ended up in an emergency room were representative of all of them? And further, that the pot smokers who ended up in emergency were likely to be somewhat distressed? I mean, its not like from my visits to emergency (not many of them involving me as a patient, thankfully) I don't see angry, upset or violent people in emergency. This presentation of the study reeks of, among other things, a massive problem with their attribution of causation, and a sampling problem. But, I'm sure that the SMH hoped they could pass it off on the unwitting masses and "do some good"

If the levels of THC in hydroponic gardens are that high, that's a danger, and it may be leading to an increase in psychotic drug users. But I don't think any myths have been shattered here.

I'm wondering if this is the University of New South Wales' bad science, or the SMH's lousy reporting. I'm hoping it is the latter.

Death's the disease, I'm the cure

yes. To perhaps be paraphrasing that greatest of philosophers, John Rambo, death is now a disease that can be treated with patentable pharmaceuticals. Whew, finally.

A 'small' pharma company has been bought out by Glaxo-SmithKline one the strength of two pharmaceuticals used to prolong life (or to treat death). These pharmaceuticals are still in the clinical trials stage, and despite their potential to supress fertility in subjects (which may even be potential targets for new patents) are said to potentially increase life expectancy by 5 - 10%. And then you drop dead. Aaaah, life. And how do they do this? One pharmaceutical activates the body's sirtuins. Why?

"The hope is that activating sirtuins in people would, like a calorically restricted diet in mice, avert degenerative diseases of aging like diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's. There is no Food and Drug Administration category for longevity drugs, so if the company is to submit a drug for approval, it needs to be for a specific disease."

So here we have the crux of it. Instead of eating healthy, and exercising the body, reducing pollution and exercising mind (all often linked to decreasing diabetes, heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer's) we have drugs, patentable drugs, to do this for us.

Forgive my cynicism, but now that death is a disease that is treatable by patentable pharmaceuticals, one has to wonder what (the) good life is.

Meta-Blogging: Simon Blackburn and his Myths

Simon Blackburn, a philosophy professor from the University professor, late last month appeared in the Times Higher Education series on academics talking "off-piste," i.e. on subjects that were beyond the realms of a) the status of higher education, or b) their primary area of expertise. Blackburn went on a nice bit of polemic, and he's caused a bit of discussion, whether it be cranky philosophers, inquisitive scientist-cum-philosophers, or (my personal favourite) being turned into a football game. As always, the comment sections are a joy to peruse.

As Catherine mentioned in the comments section of her last post, we do have those pesky things called doctoral theses to get back to, but I'll spend a bit of time talking about one of my personal favourites, Blackburn's myth #4- the myth of the scientist:

This claims that there is an expertise, science, and that people who are good at it deserve a lot of attention. This is almost wholly false. There is no such thing as a scientist, and it is a shame that William Whewell, a rather patchy philosopher (although a Cambridge man), invented the term. There are only biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians and so on. These may be very bright people, but the moment one of them steps a millimetre or two outside their special area of expertise, they are no better than the rest of us.

Problems such as foot-and-mouth disease, global temperatures and badgers, to name but three, need different baskets of expertises, if indeed there are any to be had. A fortiori, there should be no such thing as The Government Scientist. A version of this myth is that something called science is a self-propelled self-governing activity of special virtue, dedicated solely to truth. This ignores the huge proportion of physical scientists who work for the misnamed Ministry of Defence, and the biological scientists who work for big pharma, trying to get around the patents on drugs that do little for the disease burden of the world but that can be sold to the rich. Scientists have one catch-all answer when confronted with such unfortunate facts, which is to claim that the critic must be some kind of relativist. This is a Berkeleian term: nobody knows what it means, but everybody knows it is bad.

I love this, because it plays in precisely with the entire point of this series in The Times. Blackburn is correct, I believe: there is a growing trend of hyper-specialisation in the sciences. But that's not enough to be an answer for us, and I'm going to separate Blackburn's initial comment regarding the non-existence of the scientist into two factors: The scientist as a taxonomic term, and the scientist as a lifestyle.

If, as some in the above articles would suggest, believe that Blackburn is referring to the taxonomy of humans into respective fields of endeavour, then it is safe to say that Blackburn has misstepped. Of course there are scientists. Blackburn's myth #1 plays strongly into this: we give the word meaning to class a certain range of endeavours: physics, chemistry, biology, geology, (some think) psychology, even medicine, and many more, plus the sub disciplines of each. Where there is the behemoth of a field of discovery called science, a way of gaining knowledge about the world termed the "scientific method," there will be scientists. In this way, the term scientist exists, but far removed from the idea of a scientist , which is far more controversial.

The second part of Blackburn's article outlines what he seems to perceive as a number of conflicting positions scientists fill in this world which eat away at the image of the scientist. I'd go so far to say that this is correct, and a little sad for the scientific enterprise. To be sure, I've met men and women of science in the true sense of the words: disinterested, sharing, skeptical, and humble. Everything Merton could have dreamed. But there aren't many, and indeed Merton has many, many critics. Scientists as a group of people are diverse: there are the near-monastic scientists who are aware that they have ethical obligations to the larger community for the trust placed upon them in their expertise. There is also a legion of science-jerks out there. And for better or worse, their skill cannot inform us on which ones they will be.

Should this idea, "the scientist," exist? I think so. When you look back on the history of the sciences, those who embody the scientist tend to achieve greatness on a level that exceeds mere publication record. They also make a contribution to the society in which they reside, and occasionally even to the world as a whole. This is not to say that they are the only ones, but their contributions are often startling. And, in line with The Times' point regarding academics talking "off-piste," the "scientists" of history were often generalists. We can't all be, because sometimes, that's not the set of tools we are born with. Some people are designed to do one thing, and do that with a skill without peer. But for the rest of us, to learn more about the breadth of the experiences in this world makes us more conscious of our place within it. And if my thesis works out, that could solve some problems within science at the moment.

This was a little off track, but hey. In summery: Blackburn's piece reeks of polemic and rant. That's cool, but he's fallen prey to his first myth: he's incited responses that don't consider the full import of a situation, but instead react based on the meaning of words. That said, he has some points worth discussing, even if he may be a little extreme at times.

Back to the thesis!

Informed consent trumped by backward crazy Oklahomans

Nothing gets my goat quite as much as pro-lifers. But y'know, I'm happy for them to stand around with their placards and waste money on stupid videos and pamphlets I'll never see or read, as long as they don't impose themselves on me or anyone in fact. Peaceful protest and all. It's when they manage to wangle their way into legislature and practise at clinics or when they start up their own clinics masquerading as medical centres for pregnant women that I really start to get annoyed.

I won't go into the amazingly detailed annoyances I have with their whole outlook on this issue, because it'll just make me even more mad than I am already, but today I found this article which just makes me livid. In short, Oklahoma has brought in legislation that requires women seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound.

Under the guise of obtaining informed patient consent, this new law requires doctors to withhold pregnancy termination until an ultrasound is performed. The law states that either an abdominal or vaginal ultrasound, whichever gives the best image of the fetus, must be done. Neither the patient nor the doctor can decide which type of ultrasound to use, and the patient cannot opt out of the ultrasound and still have the procedure. In effect, then, the legislature has mandated that a woman have an instrument placed in her vagina for no medical benefit. The law makes no exception for victims of rape and incest.

Argh. I can't even begin to explain how wrong this whole thing is. Consent is about taking into account specific situations and giving people the choice about violations of ethical norms, empowering people to act with their own best interests in mind, not imposing unnecessary restrictions and backward religious beliefs on people.

Grr.

Starting fires as a form of political expression...

This article in Nature seems to have started a number of rants.

I'll get around to writing something meaningful about this, and related phenomena, a bit later (I've got a number of books due back to the library that can't be renewed, and I need to finish them- a task that has and will require many more hours of reading, and coffee, to accomplish). In the meantime, I'd love to hear people's thoughts.

What interests me about articles and research like this is not the Nature article itself, but the comments to the article. Nothing says ruffled feathers, angry bloggers, and general nastiness like pulling Internet users into a sexism debate.

Neuroweapons, oh my!

From this post of Catie's. I'm not going to delve too much into the legal ramifications too much, the article mentioned in the post, and the mindhacks article go into this a lot.

Now this is a juicy dual-use dilemma. White, in his paper, mentions the beneficent side of this technology: enabling people with severe physical disabilities to gain back some of their independence. Specifically, White mentions mind-control prosthetics. Hello bionic revolution! This has numerous potential positive effects on the level of health care in western societies, and White notes that DARPA has plans for using the research to help out veterans. This is great news, to my mind, because the greatest cost to a country in terms of war is not necessarily the death toll, but the number of injuries. Now, I'm not saying that getting hurt is worse than dying (in all cases, at least), but in terms of the burdens inflicted upon the wounded soldier's psyche, the burdens on the health care system, and the families of all those involved. it'd be lovely if a quadriplegic could have some mobility. For a pentaplegics (so neck also immobilised, which often entails lack of speech, and essentially is full paralysis), this could mean better communication with the outside world, something terribly important.

What about the negative, though? Obviously, there is the new set of weapons coming out, which have many implications for what it means to commit a war crime, as White mentions in detail. But I'd like to raise another negative outcome of this new technology. This requires me to digress slightly, to fill in a couple of points about the nature of combat. I'm referring here primarily a conception taught to me by the late Philip D'Alton, who was a lecturer in sociology at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and I had the great fortune to be taught by personally. The conception of war we have, unsurprisingly, is a glorified one. Even to look at the dioramas in war memorials, in all their `realism,' we fail to understand the sheer brutality summed up best by Karl von Clausewitz, the immortal slogan: "War is Hell." We fail to understand that in the scenario of modern war, although casualties may be low compared to the advent of total war, or the analogues we can best envision in nuclear holocaust or world war, injuries are generally present in combat at a 1:8 ratio, death:injury. This ratio, in the case of certain recent maneuvers by the United States military, may be as high as 1:16. So imagine that in the current actions in Iraq, not claiming in excess of 3,000 lives, that between 24,000 and 48,000 men have been wounded in one aspect or another. not all of these are life threatening, and not all of these are disabling, but many are. We here "1 killed, 6 wounded" on the news, those 6 may be cuts and bruises, or amputations, internal bleeding, organ failure, etc. And those of us back home have no conception of this, short of the occasional movie that bothers to go partly into this detail (there have been more recently, but still not many compared to the swathe of rambo-esque movies out there).

So what does it mean for an army controlled from home? What does it mean to have a soldier whose understanding of the nature of war is, even after a tour of duty, no more than a kid's after a run through on a video game (although if you believe Jack Thompson, they are more likely to kill you...)? As war becomes not only more clinical and sterile on our TV screens, inuring many in our society to be tacitly accepting of whenever a country decides to head off to another conflict, but more sterile for the soldiers, it would be my opinion that the normative concepts that stay our hand when we conceive of going to war are eroded, and this is a terrible thing. The foundations of any conception of a Just War rely on an intuition that understands that war is hell. People die, limbs are shot off, landmines tear face apart, people walk in a daze with vital organs spilling out. I'm not sure how many of you, dear readers, have ever actually been in a fist fight of any kind, but for myself at least there is a certain understanding that if that's what getting punched in the face/ribs/ear feels like, getting shot is going to be a darn sight worse.

I'm not one of those guys who disagrees with the conflict in Iraq because I "don't support the troops." I support the sacrifice a career soldier makes in choosing to take the act of killing and dying on as his principal vocation. But what has to remain in the consciousness of those who sanction a war, and in a democratic society the citizen forms a part of that process, is that there is a fundamental aspect of war which, while necessary, should inform our decision. If we take the understanding of suffering away from the process of war, this could be highly problematic.

So, not so much a rant on neuroweapons, so much as a rant on what removing the soldier from combat could mean. It's almost 10, I should, you know, write my thesis. Or something.

Scary neuroweapons

This article (thanks Nicholas) is just plain scary.

The big question is, with new weapons being able to be developed that act before you've even thought about it (preconsciously), could you be charged with a war crime if you use one illegally? Or is it, without any intention involved, merely an accident?

Hooboy.

Replies to Catherine

In response to This post

I'm not sure what I think. I'm personally not a fan of drugs,¹ and we do have sanctions against doping in such things as sports events. So why would this be any different?

I want to draw the readers attention to another set of disciplines that has associations with drugs: the creative arts. Music, in particular (at least according to my musician friends) has a thriving drug culture, far in excess of scientists in terms of the variety and regularity of consumption. And yet, while these artists may be committing crimes, it is not often expressed in terms of their cheating their field by taking drugs, which (and especially I suspect, considering some of the modern art scene) may enhance the `creative process.' It would seem that artists dope quite heavily in terms of using substance to enhance performance. And yet, despite the legal and health problems associated with drug use, it does seem to be a bit of a norm in society that painters, musicians and other dramatic and creative artists will use drugs.

This isn't just to target the arts. Any fan of my good mate Hunter S. Thompson will be aware of a certain precedent his story and indeed popular media (he says after watching an episode of about a drug-using journalist portraying the journalism industry as a bit drug-oriented, although perhaps I could go out on a limb and say that's less hallucinogenic (Thompson aside) and my stimulant-based.

So what would be wrong with scientists? I guess one way to look at this is to compare our intuitions as to which one of any of the variety of drug-using sections of society scientists can be most closely identified with, and what the drugs are actually doing. If we identify them with athletes, and the use of drugs to augment the scale of their performance based attributes, i.e. steroids, HGH, and diuretics all augment an attribute that directly relates to the performance of the skill of the athlete: strength, muscle building capacity, or weight. It is also very goal-driven: the drugs are consumed with the end of the drug use being a short period (generally) of competition.

It would seem that the use of scientists is more long-term - they use drugs to aid them in staying focused over long periods of time. In this case, I would compare them to journalists: they use stimulants or anti-anxiety meds to allow them to remain focused for long periods of time. The drugs (the study aid capacity of Ritalin I imagine is based around it's affects of ADHD - it actually allows you to think about one thing longer, while keeping the frantic energy of high-stress jobs intact) are designed not to enhance an attribute. If they were taking drugs to enhance data retention, mathematical ability, or some other cognitive function, we could compare them to the doping of athletes. If their drugs made them more creative, then maybe artists, but it seems to me that the primary end of these drugs is that one that escapes us all: time. Time not worrying, not procrastinating (he says writing in a blog instead of his thesis); time to study. That's a journalist mentality.

So the question now remains is: is this morally permissible? And that's a harder problem to examine. I can't go to the moral high ground here: I've had more than my fair share of 3am, wired-on-inconceivable-amounts-of-caffeine mathematics sessions during my honours thesis and previous to that in undergrad. What I can say is that it does reinforce a certain preconception about the sciences: that the big leaps in science is a young man's game. It's played like a high-stakes game, as the study shows with the higher proportions of drug users being in the younger age groups. Is this acceptable? In terms of data retention, the job of the young scientist (he'll need it all for later studies!), and mathematics that borders on the divine, it sure as hell helps. But I can't seem to grasp an opinion. My primary concern is that it promotes the increasing drug-oriented culture of our society, which I have some problems with on an intuitive level. I think that life needs to slow down, but I can understand why some people can't. Maybe the scientists should get into yoga? That is meant to help concentration. I can speak with personal experience on the advantages of meditation in improving composure and concentration.

But pills are a lot easier.





¹Okay, that's not the whole truth: I am a big fan of coffee, but after 4.5 years of strenuous study as a physics major I've developed such a tolerance to it that it doesn't do anything anymore to me, apart from the emotional feeling of contentment I get from the smell.